Field of Disclosure
This disclosure relates generally to natural language processing and more particularly to inferring attributes of a recipe.
Description of the Related Art
Although recipes are available from many sources (e.g., the Internet), such recipes do not have a standard format and may omit various characteristics of a recipe such as seasons or holidays associated with a recipe. The holiday associated with a recipe is relevant for recipe users looking for recipes traditionally associated with the current season or an upcoming holiday. Other users may seek to avoid a temporally relevant recipe in favor of a recipe not associated with a particular holiday. For example, a user preparing a December dinner for a multi-religious group of friends looks for recipes without a connection to any religious December holidays.
Some recipes have associated metadata indicating recipe attributes. For example, a header of a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) page describing a recipe includes metadata tags categorizing a recipe. Unfortunately, such metadata tags are available only for a subset of recipes, and even those recipes with metadata tags typically do not include metadata tags that categorize a recipe by holiday or season.
Some recipes may include subjective descriptions by the author that indicate a recipe's holiday or seasonal associations. Accurately interpreting the text of a subjective description to determine seasonal associations of a recipe is a difficult natural language processing problem due to the numerous ways of expressing that a recipe is associated with a given season or holiday. Furthermore, such an approach does not provide temporal information indicating when a recipe is of interest to readers because the posting time of a recipe may lead or lag the time period during which a recipe is relevant.